Giovanni's Room

These radial forms and brilliant colors recall Canboulay, a precursor to carnival in Trinidad and Tobago, which Ové celebrated as a child. Having grown up around his family’s dress shop, Ové is interested in honoring the anonymous women laborers who made these doilies, which he sourced globally. “I became interested in a sort of ‘Granny Psychedelia’—that these doilies were often made by repressed women through the 1970s and 1980s in Catholic homes across South America, Eastern Europe, and Africa.”

For Ové, carnival’s masquerade is an expression of emancipation and unification. Several of his works are titled after novels by his mentor, James Baldwin. Giovanni’s Room is a 1956 Baldwin novel that could also be said to explore masquerade.